The present invention relates generally to building construction and particularly to modular-type or prefabricated building wall and roof components and to methods of and apparatus for erecting same.
The rapid rise in the costs of building materials and of construction labor over recent years has been widely publicized and has been accompanied by a corresponding decrease in conventional building construction, particularly home construction. As a result, wide-scale efforts have been made toward the development of less expensive and most cost-efficient construction techniques. The prefabrication of building components in a factory setting permits the realization of the economies attendant to mass production and has become one of the most widely employed techniques in reducing construction costs. While mobile homes represent perhaps the ultimate use of prefabrication techniques, they rarely provide the appearance of a conventional home and continue to be considered significantly less desirable than conventionally-built homes. Homes constructed with modular or prefabricated components have met with somewhat greater acceptance than mobile homes since they provide similar cost savings through factory mass production of the components but still are erected on-site in an otherwise generally conventional manner whereby such homes typically have the appearance and appeal of a conventionally-built home. The major disadvantage of construction using modular or prefabricated components lies in the necessity that the factory-built components nevertheless must ordinarily be erected by a crew of several skilled workmen using special tools. While some savings in erection labor costs are realized in the use of modular or prefabricated components, such savings are relatively minimal and thus the total cost of a home built using such components is ordinarily not significantly less than that of a similar conventionally-built home.
In both mobile home construction and in the construction of modular or prefabricated components, various proposals have been made to alleviate or at least lessen the above-noted problems. Thus, for example, numerous forms of expansible mobile home construction have been designed employing slidable, foldable, pivoting and telescoping wall, roof and other components intended to permit the mobile home to be expanded into building structures of varying shapes and sizes intended to be comparable in appearance to conventional homes. Similarly, it has been proposed to pre-assemble modular and prefabricated units slidably, foldably or the like for easier and quicker erection at the intended building site. Such manners of construction provide some improvement over the aforedescribed construction technique but still ordinarily require skilled labor to accomplish the erection process.
In contrast, the present invention provides a method and apparatus by which the erection of prefabricated, pivotably affixed roof and wall sections may be easily and quickly accomplished at any desired erection site by a small number of unskilled workers employing only the present apparatus and conventional hand tool, thereby facilitating the erection of the walls and roof of a home by its owner enabling the maximization of labor cost savings.